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I jumped on the Opera bandwagon when it went free (8.5?) and I thought it was great.

I ultimately went back to Ff because I didn't like the all-in-one browser/mail/etc. It had some issues on XP (install/uninstall oddities). It also crashed when I repeated the same word using Speak (like 100 times), but I should have seen that coming.

I even had to go grab Auto Refresh, Mouse Gesture, and QuickNote (with the All-in-One Sidebar, of course).

I jumped on the Opera bandwagon when it went free (8.5?) and I thought it was great.

I ultimately went back to Ff because I didn't like the all-in-one browser/mail/etc. It had some issues on XP (install/uninstall oddities). It also crashed when I repeated the same word using Speak (like 100 times), but I should have seen that coming.

I even had to go grab Auto Refresh, Mouse Gesture, and QuickNote (with the All-in-One Sidebar, of course).

I jumped on the Opera bandwagon when it went free (8.5?) and I thought it was great.

I ultimately went back to Ff because I didn't like the all-in-one browser/mail/etc. It had some issues on XP (install/uninstall oddities). It also crashed when I repeated the same word using Speak (like 100 times), but I should have seen that coming.

I even had to go grab Auto Refresh, Mouse Gesture, and QuickNote (with the All-in-One Sidebar, of course).

They're both subsets so far -- and unfortunately they're not the same subsets. Opera 8 supports SVG Tiny. Mozilla intends to implement SVG Full eventually, but the current SVG support in Firefox 1.5 is still missing quite a bit.

So some features work in both browsers, some only work in Opera, and some only work in Firefox.

Just a couple of months ago I remember a story here, on /., about Opera giving away free serial numbers for their browser to anyone who wanted one (or more.) I must admit, I got myself one of those numbers and tried the browser and hated it. So I am stuck with FF for now because there is no way in hell I will use IE ever again in my life (haven't used it except in corporate environment for IE based intranet apps that someone wrote for over 3 years now.)

But I am getting disappointed with FF - it crashes badly, processes get stuck, memory is an issue. There are problems. I hope these problems will be fixed quickly because this is getting annoying, and even though I told DarkSin here that I am not about to port LeetKey to Opera because I am not using it at the moment, I may just have to do that if I decide to switch to that browser if I feel that FF is just not what I want to see as a browser.

# fetchmail + procmail + mutt + spamassassin + msmtp: No-nonsense mail reading and sending.

# Firefox * Adblock: Saves an astonishing amount of screen real estate.

I'll add a couple of my own:

Vim! Because it's VI, only better!

For those who use gnome, gnome-terminal has tabs! Ctrl-Shift-T and open as many as you want. For some reason it took me a year or two to discover this. I typically have a couple of tabs open, including a root window. It's great for quickly checking logs or for installing software or whathaveyou, and it's much neater than having multiple windows open all over the place.

PDF Download - Firefox Extension Allows to choose whether you want to view a PDF file inside the browser (as PDF or HTML) or you want to download it! https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=636&application=firefox

• ion | ratpoision; Pane-based (v. window-based) window managers. Little to no wasted screen real estate. Significantly reduced mouse usage.
• emacs: Wickedly powerful text editor/operating environment.
  • WhizzyTeX: Updates DVI in another window as you edit TeX/LaTeX.
  • AUCTeX: Very powerful emacs extensions for TeX/LaTeX.
• fetchmail + procmail + mutt + spamassassin + msmtp: No-nonsense mail reading and sending.
• bash completions: Quasi-telepathic tab completion.
• Firefox
  • Adblock: Saves an astonishing amount of screen real estate.
• screen: Among many other abilities, screen+ssh can provide VNC-like capabilities for your terminal sessions.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24697 4

There have been a few ray casting engines for the canvas that have been written and improved upon over each other. Here is the first known ray caster written with the canvas, it is grainy, but can get around 24 FPS on the right system, you can also adjust the amount of jaggedness for a loss of some framerate. I've developed a few things with the canvas. Most recently this, but am currently working on Conway's Game of Life, and then an optimized ray caster to try and get more FPS out of it. Interesting thing to note is that the canvas widget currently only has a 2d context, but is supposed to get a 3d context as well sometime in the future. That would be really cool to have native 3D rendering support in a browser, until then though writing a 3d engine using the 2d canvas is a fun experiment. I'm curremtly testing AJAX to see if it can hold its own in real time communication with the server so that a multiplayer FPS can be made, its looking like something is plausible so I urge anyone who can to try and make it a reality. I'll give it a shot if I get some spare time.
Regards,
Steve

Most of the memory leak is due to http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/1 1/25/1817215

[I think https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13145 6 probably doesn't help either]

Seems to happen especially when looking at a lot of images :D

I read somewhere it was fixed in FF1.5b1 - can anyone confirm?

DugUk

Wireless Connection Status > Properties > Internet Protocol > General > DNS

I set it to one of their nameservers.

The funny thing is, their little image ( http://www.unifiedroot.com/registrars ) now shows me a "You have access to whole internet" (yeah, like I'd actually care about the 0.0 percent of the web that uses their registrar) but URLs like http://schiphol/ don't seem to work... Anyone else try?

By the way, unless you want to lock out 90% of all possible customers, you'll probably keep your old domain name running (I know Schiphol has).

The Yahoo article is very biased for the move, but the "clinched deals with most ISPs in Turkey" is quite major. This could mean a greater fragmentation of the internet... we know countries can do it, we know that China has done it.

This will only make those working on the cookie problem ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25234 2 and http://secunia.com/advisories/12580/ )... now who's the top level, and at what level do we trust cookies? Choices, choices...

sure, but it's not standard by any means.

Mozilla: http://www.firefox.com/
Internet Explorer: http:///?%20firefox (with a The page cannot be displayed error)

It works in IE, too. Only the keyword is not separate from the title of Favorites entry. So if I bring up the firefox page and then add it to my favorites (shortening the page name down to just "Firefox") I can now type "firefox" in the address bar and it will work. Another limitation of the IE version is it only works on favorites in the root level of the Favorites menu. Organize your favorites into subfolders, and it stops working.

You can, in some browsers, already use keywords as a sort of domain.

Take Firefox for example. I no longer type "slashdot.org" or "teknews.net" into the address bar. I simply type "slashdot" or "teknews". Firefox realizes the domain doesn't exist, and does a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search. In most case it sends me to the site whose name ends in that domain.

What about domains where the keyword doesn't link to the domain? Well, if I type "firefox" into the address bar and hit enter, I'm not going to go to firefox.com, but http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. Now, chances are that that is actually where I want to go.

So, maybe this might make sense from a business perspective, but from a consumer perspective, it is already here.

Hmm. Can't wait until Apache becomes mature and pragmatic. Or Debian, and Slackware too. And all those immature projects on Sourceforge. When that happens well, by golly, you'll probably see these eccentric oddities at Lawrence Livermore Labs or running on Cray hardware.

If they were really mature and pragmatic, they just might make it into government use, or even become more commonplace.

We can only patiently wait for that wonderful maturity and pragmatism to blossom. Until then we should be thankful that we are skillfully guided by the benign monopolists. They only have our best interests at heart.

This was a nifty piece of investigation, but doesnt address the largest cause of firefox memory usage. Namely, memory is not freed when tabs are closed.

See:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13145 6

Try a test. Fire up a clean FF and note memory usage. Go to somewhere like fark.com and open 50 links in tabs and note mem usage. Close every tab and see if mem usage goes down. It doesnt. Most people visit dozens of pages a day. Hundreds per week. After a while, the memory footprint of FF can grow to epic proportions (ie hundreds of megs) even with only a few tabs open because FF cannot release memory of closed tabs. I have to restart FF every week or so because I'm tired of it using 200MB for no good reason.

It doesnt bother me so much that FF stores uncompressed images for tabs which are active (ie. open, even if not visible). The article itself mentions a performance hit when storing compressed images. But why the f*** cant it free the memory when I close that tab? The fact that I explicity closed it should indicate that I dont want it anymore. FF developers have acknowledged the problem but have said that there is no easy fix. Probably a poor design in the underlying architecture, though no one associated with the project would state it that bluntly.

BTW, this article reminds me of one of the best reasons to use some sort of adblocking software. You save quite a bit of memory when you arent caching a dozen useless images with every new web page you visit. Especially in light of the above bug, you can significantly slow down the expanding memory footprint with adblocking.

and while you are at it, dont forget to add a Kitchensink too.

In the (rare) occasions in which Firefox crashed on my Mac, Session Saver was a great helping hand (I don't use its automatic restore for every startup, just for browser crashes).

Don't know whether it restores data such as server-session-id cookies (which would be needed to salvage this insurance app incident, for example), but having such an option available as a plugin is what made me stick to Firefox in both Windows and Mac OS X.

fwiw, they've fixed an issue with the removal of plugins crashing ff. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31602 5#c6 appears to have been a popular issue.

You can get the session saver extention which allows you to open your previous tabs.

I hate it to restart with all those tabs open.

Get SessionSaver.
It will restore your open tabs on startup or after a crash. It is also great for when one of the plugins (flash, java, or maybe just Firefox itself) makes the browser slow down over time; after a lot of usage you can just close it and reopen Firefox -- with all your tabs but a fresh start on memory usage. This extension has almost entirely eliminated the need for bookmarks for me too.

Indeed. It's rather annoying, that I have to close Firefox after a whole day at work while leaving all other programs running over night.

For your tabs, there's an extension which saves your tabs (or other stuff) when you close Firefox and reopens all of them when you start it up again: SessionSaver.

Word! If you use firefox and want this fixed, vote for bug 312418 or add a comment to it.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31241 8

Hyperlinks are disabled from slashdot so you'll have to cut and paste this link to a new browser window.

sure: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nig htly/latest-trunk/

I am thankful, in light of this article, for Firefox.

I am thankful that I am smart enough to not have used IE for over a year.

I am thankful that I have convinced my wife and my parents to also use Firefox as well.

I am thankful that things like these keep happening to IE, but only with respect to the fact that it might make those last few businesses that I deal with (re: bank) to modify their pages to support non-IE browsers.

I am thankful for retaining the hope that there are still intelligent people out there.

I am thankful, in light of this article, for Firefox.

I am thankful that I am smart enough to not have used IE for over a year.

I am thankful that I have convinced my wife and my parents to also use Firefox as well.

I am thankful that things like these keep happening to IE, but only with respect to the fact that it might make those last few businesses that I deal with (re: bank) to modify their pages to support non-IE browsers.

I am thankful for retaining the hope that there are still intelligent people out there.

And use the NoScript extension https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?application=firefox&id=722

Okay, dumbass. Nice try at getting a couple of dollars out of a few people. Perhaps you could have linked to the real website instead of being stupid about it.

Easy fix...Firefox http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

Extra protection for your Firefox: NoScript allows JavaScript, Java (and other plugins) only for trusted domains of your choice (e.g. your home-banking web site). This whitelist based pre-emptive blocking approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities (known and even unknown!) with no loss of functionality... Experts will agree: Firefox is really safer with NoScript ;-)

I'd go a step further (higher). As more and more things are moving to the Web, and as web application are getting richer and richer, I'd guess that in the next 5 or so years the OS will become quite irrelevant to the end user, who will access a lot more "desktop" applications through a web interface.

Use Flashblock to stop flash objects. There is a button you can click to enable what you want. You can also use Fasterfox which includes a flash popup blocker.

For some reason my links don't work so lets try this.
Flashblock https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=433
Fasterfox https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=1269&application=firefox

Use Flashblock to stop flash objects. There is a button you can click to enable what you want. You can also use Fasterfox which includes a flash popup blocker.

For some reason my links don't work so lets try this.
Flashblock https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=433
Fasterfox https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=1269&application=firefox

I've seen a rash of annoying pop-up and "peel-back" ads. Anything that covers existing content without me explicly asking it to do so is by definition annoying.

AdBlock.

Google ads are some of the few I don't block: They aren't annoying, in fact, sometimes they're even interresting.

But anything that flashes, moves, makes sound, pops up or under, or worse: Loads VIDEO in a banner, freezing my browser and all it's tabs while doing so, is blocked. That last one is what pushed me over the ethical conundrum of wanting the websites to make money but not wanting to have an epilepsy attack when I visit, freezing my browser to force me to see and hear an ad for something I'm not interrested in went too far, now I adBlock their site and I will forever boycott that product that was pushing itself on me so forcibly.

Are there adverts on the internet then? WTF...

True enough though, for a while I couldn't be bothered to filter Google's ads. Nowadays I find RIP and CustomizeGoogle keep the interface nice and clean.

Useful links for those that like to make their own mind up:

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
http://www.customizegoogle.com/
http://rip.mozdev.org/index.html
http://adblock.mozdev.org/
http://www.pierceive.com/

And for those that might bleat "without advertising, many sites would fail" I say Good. Let those sites fail. Give me micropayments and an honest relationship.

if you use firefox you could advance from the stone age very quickly.

Oh, and we all know that no open source Web browser includes bookmarks immediately upon installation. Care to think that maybe the bookmarks included might help some people get a bit of a start in finding entertainment news, etc?
No matter which browser I'm using, I always delete all of the included bookmarks immediately. They're annoying, ad-related or not.

Some extension was specifically created to save session so that people would be able to save session, exit FF, free leaked memory, start FF, and load saved session. This is really ridiculous - to have some extension to bypass bug instead of fixing bug.

In my case I have 512 Mb of memory and have to restart FF at least once a week. This is quite undesirable for my work since I like to keep some pages open for reference (scientific research) for a while. Also, few sites require login, and restarting FF even with that extension is not that simple.

In my opinion, this bug is the most important thing that makes me question the usability of FF. Really, I need to adjust my browsing behavior in order to deal with this bug, and constantly check task manager (>300Mb => restart).

Yeah, I know it takes like 7 minutes or so (3 or so for the fastest machine), but they are commonly referred to as ``hourly'' (using terrorist quotes to annoy people). Hm, interesting, only the slowest machine actually takes more than an hour.

Or you could the CustomizeGoogle extension for firefox. It has a checkbox under GMail for "switch to https".

Extension link:

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=743

Firefox 1.5 RC2 notes:

The CPU hogging bug in RC2, in which Firefox eventually begins using 98% CPU time, is much worse than in release versions of Firefox. The hibernation bug is far worse, too.

Even though there have been reports from many people, and even though the bug is easily demonstrated, Mozilla developers refuse to investigate this bug. Below is a quote from comment #45 of Bugzilla bug 222660.

The URL is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22266 0#c45, but it must be copied into a new browser window, since Bugzilla does not accept people coming from Slashdot.

------- Comment #45 From Mike Connor 2005-11-15 10:14 PST [reply] -------

Do we have crash and hang bugs? Sure, absolutely, just search on bugs marked critical. Is this particular bug which is basically saying "bad things happen sometimes" of any use? Not at all. There are bugs on memory leaks, many of which have been fixed for 1.5, same with crashes, and the hibernation issue you mentioned.

I'm going to mark this particular bug as INVALID again, because it is of a vast and unfixable scope. Sooner or later, if you browse enough sites, you can hit a crash bug. That doesn't mean its the same crash (code flaw) every time, or a single fix can change that.

I find this admission revealing. I would not have guessed that Firefox crash bugs are so prevalent.

If you are experiencing the CPU hogging bug, please mention it here. Also please go to bug and record your experiences and vote for the bug.

Firefox developers have been refusing to investigate this bug for 2 1/2 years! So, I doubt it has been fixed in Firefox v. 1.5 RC3, which I am testing now.

One thing I find a little dissapointing is that it does not save the links to the pages you were surfing but instead brings you to your default home pages. While I know this might be a little hard to do or deal with due to post information on some pages but it would be nice for firefox to attempt to bring you back to the place you were before.

Never used it myself, but this seems like it would do what you want:

SessionSaver - https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=436

"SessionSaver restores your browser -exactly- as you left it, every startup, every time. Not even a crash will phase it. Windows, tabs, even things you were typing -- they're all saved. Use the menu to add + remove sessions; right, shift, or middle-clicking will delete."

Why do we care? Because FireFox is one of the most important pieces of software out there, if for no other reason than it works so well that it makes M$ actually work at making IE truly more useful to the consumer.

What in technology is more critical than the Internet? Hence, what software is more critical than the browser that gives you more utility, power, freedom, and peace of mind?

I'd like to continue to hear about these releases, thank you.

MS uses ActiveX scripting objects to support additional languages, so doing it the MS way would require blanket support for ActiveX. That actually wouldn't be difficult to do in FF for Windows, but it leaves FF out in the cold on every other platform. It also sets a really bad precedent.

This could also be supported through the plugin architecture, but that puts us back in the 90's, where sites commonly required proprietary binary plugins or ActiveX controls. We already know that's a developmental dead end and a security nightmare. The current JavaScript architecture however, is an open ECMA spec that is directly addressed in the W3C standards. The presense of and adherence to these standards is one one the major factors contributing to the current explosion of new web technologies. I agree that AJAX is a silly buzzword, but at least it's keeping browser and web developers focused on standards support and interoperability.

I do think there is still a vacuum for a language Nuetral VM with a strong security sandbox that can hook into the DOM. Java applets should have filled this niche, but Sun repeatedly botched the delivery. MS .NET client web controls are another option, and Mono can provide support on non-MS platforms. Unfortunately these don't really seem to be going anywhere. I'd really like to see something in this arena catch on, but interoperability and security are essential for that to happen. And blind scripting interfaces won't provide that.

Now, language independence for extensions and internal development is a different issue. If you had done a little research you would see that Mozilla has had Python support for years, but it's not in the release versions. A little more research would probably land you at the Gecko roadmap where you'd find some info on the language neutral DOM interface in Gecko 1.9. Poking a little further would probably lead you to XULRunner. At that point I hope you will see that the intent of the development is quite intelligent and open. The fact is that it just takes time to get there and there are lot of factors to consider.

P.S. - I'd also suggest taking a closer look at JavaScript before calling it a brain-dead language. It's far from perfect, but certainly more intelligible and maintainable than Perl when used properly. And for it's target environment it actually works quite well.

MS uses ActiveX scripting objects to support additional languages, so doing it the MS way would require blanket support for ActiveX. That actually wouldn't be difficult to do in FF for Windows, but it leaves FF out in the cold on every other platform. It also sets a really bad precedent.

This could also be supported through the plugin architecture, but that puts us back in the 90's, where sites commonly required proprietary binary plugins or ActiveX controls. We already know that's a developmental dead end and a security nightmare. The current JavaScript architecture however, is an open ECMA spec that is directly addressed in the W3C standards. The presense of and adherence to these standards is one one the major factors contributing to the current explosion of new web technologies. I agree that AJAX is a silly buzzword, but at least it's keeping browser and web developers focused on standards support and interoperability.

I do think there is still a vacuum for a language Nuetral VM with a strong security sandbox that can hook into the DOM. Java applets should have filled this niche, but Sun repeatedly botched the delivery. MS .NET client web controls are another option, and Mono can provide support on non-MS platforms. Unfortunately these don't really seem to be going anywhere. I'd really like to see something in this arena catch on, but interoperability and security are essential for that to happen. And blind scripting interfaces won't provide that.

Now, language independence for extensions and internal development is a different issue. If you had done a little research you would see that Mozilla has had Python support for years, but it's not in the release versions. A little more research would probably land you at the Gecko roadmap where you'd find some info on the language neutral DOM interface in Gecko 1.9. Poking a little further would probably lead you to XULRunner. At that point I hope you will see that the intent of the development is quite intelligent and open. The fact is that it just takes time to get there and there are lot of factors to consider.

P.S. - I'd also suggest taking a closer look at JavaScript before calling it a brain-dead language. It's far from perfect, but certainly more intelligible and maintainable than Perl when used properly. And for it's target environment it actually works quite well.

RC3 has now been linked on the main Mozilla.org page. Please use the regular download page instead of the link in the article so that a mirror can be chosen instead of hammering that one site.

Mozilla site already has a page describing RC3:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/

You have to run it as root/admin first to avoid this error message: Firefox could not install this item because of a failure in Chrome Registration. Please contact the author about this problem.

Sure I could run it as admin first, but that is completely unacceptable. No better than what most Windows devs pull off.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31148 0
Not present in 1.0.7 and lower.

My favorite is the ugly black blobs in tooltips bug. It affects pretty much every platform, and is readily obvious to even casual non-tech users and really an embarrassment for anyone trying to encourage others to use Firefox.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67127

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
(been up since last night)

Release notes:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/1 .5.html